The last two evenings here have been beautiful. Even though we're two weeks from the peak date of flaring geosats for this latitude, with my 12x60 I've been able to see DBS 1 (93-078A, 22930), and the pair XM-1 (01-018A, 26761) and XM-2 (01-012A, 26724). Tuesday evening I added one of the ANIK F1/ANIK F1-R pair (00-076A, 26624; 05-036A, 28868). Mike put the telescope on this pair and found them not leading and trailing but over/under, one north of the other. Of course I'm hoping for good weather a week from now, when they will be brighter! For a graphical approach to observing flaring geosats, see Jeff Umbarger's Graphical Geosat Flare Calculator: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Sep-2006/0029.html Mike McCants has released a new version of his special Highfly version which predicts eclipse entry and exit. It sorts the output by azimuth. It's a small DOS program, a quick download; here's a direct link: http://users2.ev1.net/~mmccants/programs/highecl.zip Here's a message with some background information on flaring geosats: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Sep-2005/0289.html Or search on the terms "flaring geosats" or "geosat flares", etc. Here's the "calendar" for the peak flaring date by latitude for the September-October season of this phenomenon: lat. peak date ==== ========= -80 01 Sept -60 04 Sept -40 09 Sept -20 15 Sept 0 23 Sept +20 30 Sept +40 07 Oct +60 12 Oct +80 15 Oct That's adapted from Rainer Kresken's message that started it all -- seven years ago! http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Sep-1999/0002.html Ed Cannon - Austin, Texas, USA __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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